Month: February 2012

Celebrate International Women’s Day, March 8 with a feast of words and ideas from acclaimed authors Kirsten Tranter, Tara Moss and Claire Corbett, with blogger Elizabeth Lhuede, in a discussion sponsored by The Stella Prize, a new annual award for women’s writing.

This book got under my skin and awoke in me that rare experience in fiction where for a second, magic or the imagined becomes tantalisingly real. I caught my self day dreaming, watching clouds and believing. – Sean

From the back cover: Nora Porteous has spent most of her life waiting to escape. Fleeing from her small-town family and then from her stifling marriage to a mean-spirited husband, Nora arrives finally in London where she creates a new life for herself as a successful dressmaker.

Now in her seventies, Nora returns to Queensland to settle into her childhood home. But Nora has been away a long time, and the people and events are not at all like she remembered them.

This is a well-worn literary trope: middle-aged-to-elderly person looks back on her life and finds that her memories do not mean quite what she thought they did, a scenario so clichéd as to be virtually unusable now. Except it’s not. Barnes won the Booker this year with a similar set up in The Sense of an Ending. Anne Enright’s Booker-prize winning The Gathering, John Banville’s Booker-prize winning The Sea, Peter Carey’s Illywhacker and many many other books use this device.